Mental Health

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How to Structure Your Days If You're Depressed. Illustration by Lucy.

My daily structure—waking up early, daily showers, attending school—came undone with my mother’s death and my subsequent free-fall into depression.
How neuroscience explains the urge to self-harm – Carrie Arnold. Here’s what I remember about the first time I cut myself: I was mad.

As a writer, I wish I could come up with something more literary, such as: ‘The cuts provided a route through my skin for the emotions to escape.’ Or maybe: ‘I used it to translate emotional pain into physical pain.’ Or even, perhaps: ‘I engraved my suffering into my skin, turmoil writ large for all the world to see.’ These are, to some extent, true. But that’s not what I was thinking the first time I picked up a pair of scissors and slashed at my thighs.

Popular now. I Love My Distant Friends But I've Realized The Importance Of Crafting Local, In-Person Female Friendships. In college, I had a pack of women who were enough to make anyone jealous.

They’re some of the most kind, thoughtful women I’ve ever known, and they can talk about Beverly Smith and Chandra Mohanty as easily as they can talk about lipstick and handbags. They read the news. They’re all community organizers or activists.
School is a prison — and damaging our kids. Parents send their children to school with the best of intentions, believing that’s what they need to become productive and happy adults.

Many have qualms about how well schools are performing, but the conventional wisdom is that these issues can be resolved with more money, better teachers, more challenging curricula and/or more rigorous tests. But what if the real problem is school itself? The unfortunate fact is that one of our most cherished institutions is, by its very nature, failing our children and our society. School is a place where children are compelled to be, and where their freedom is greatly restricted — far more restricted than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces.
If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers. November 11th, 2011 · 275 comments The Berlin Study In the early 1990s, a trio of psychologists descended on the Universität der Künste, a historic arts academy in the heart of West Berlin.

They came to study the violinists. As described in their subsequent publication in Psychological Review, the researchers asked the academy’s music professors to help them identify a set of stand out violin players — the students who the professors believed would go onto careers as professional performers.
The Problem With How We Treat Bipolar Disorder. If You Must Think About Your Weight, Here Are 10 Things to Think. Mind Games. Ayear ago, at the end of a University of Toronto lecture on mental health promotion, I asked 400 medical students whether they would be content if psychiatrists moved them from being distraught to a state of “normal unhappiness.”

My mentor had asked me the same question when I began my training. The concept of normal unhappiness helped me accept that things were not always going to go well, and it also helped me understand my role as a psychiatrist: to intervene when time alone could not heal, and when my patients and their families or their communities could not cope. This concept of normal unhappiness has long been the standard in therapy courses, and I have raised it with my own students on and off for the past twenty-five years. That day, though, it was on my mind for other reasons. This month marks the publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness. The second issue is context.

I Did These Exercises When I Was Stoned And Depressed So You Can Do Them If You’re Tired or Lazy or Whatever. How to Be the ‘Right’ Kind of Crazy » Ashley Miller. Mini-meltdown. How to Overcome the Anxiety That's Keeping You From Achieving Your Goals. I had severe anxiety and depression for about six years.

None of the medication I took helped at all and in fact it exacerbated the problems I already had. Your better off without the pills believe it or not. I just recently got off them, after five years, and feel so much more clear headed and empowered. Oh, and the withdrawal from the medicine(anti-depressants, mood stabilizers, anti-anxiety), which some people liken to withdrawing from opiates, was far worse than anything originally felt. I did DBT which gave my insight into all the distortions, mind reading, and negative thinking in general that I had.

Disabled Philosophers « We exist. The Perils of Perfectionism. Image by flickr user simplyla/ Creative Commons licensed This is a GradHacker post by Julie Platt, PhD candidate in Writing and Rhetoric at Michigan State University, @aristotlejulep Let’s face it -- a lot of us in graduate school are perfectionists.

I could go a step farther and argue a lot of us made it into graduate school in part because of our perfectionism. Graduate school is exactly the kind of environment where perfectionism thrives. There’s a constant striving to tackle our significant workloads without error and folly. For some, perfectionism is motivation, speeding them onward through their tasks. In a way, I could point to my background in creative writing for my perfectionism and all the poor work habits that have come with it. I carried this perfectionism--disguised as writer's block--with me to my doctoral program.

Medication and therapy helped me become functional again, but perfectionism continued to reign. Was it worth it?
Academia and Mental Illness: A Preliminary List of Resources. This week I received an email from a reader who had recently been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder.

She was asking for resources I might know of to help her navigate her Ph.D. program in light of her mental illness. I didn’t know of any, so I put out a request on Facebook and Twitter. The response was instantaneous and big. I compiled all the recommendations into the following list. As you can see I just cut and pasted directly from the comments on Twitter and Facebook, without elaboration.
20 Uses for Self-Compassion. Compassion by Adriel Socrates. Fellow PT blogger, Dr Kelly McGonigal, has an excellent phrase "Self-compassion beats self-criticism any day, and in every way.
" In my therapy practice, clients often express that they want to try out self-compassion, but then strike a problem. When they're having "a moment of suffering," the self-compassion model doesn't get activated - they don't think at the time "Oh, this is a time I could use self compassion.

" To help you get started learning when to use self-compassion instead of self-criticism, here are 20 examples. Here Are 20 Examples of When to Use Self-Compassion 1. 2. 3.
When Your Brain's Wrong.